The Great Poets: John Clare

John Clare was the forgotten Romantic poet, until the late twentieth century. Known by his contemporaries as the `Peasant Poet' he recorded in his poems the natural landscape of rural England before the Industrial Revolution. His poems rival Wordsworth's for their sensitivity to nature and pantheism: `I feel a beautiful providence ever about me,' Clare wrote. But his life was a long struggle against poverty and mental collapse. Some of his finest poems were written in the local asylum.